Knowledgeable, but Who do not perform such technical Christians
Dmitry Sokolov-MitrichThis phrase a couple of months ago dropped in my blog one stranger to me. I asked what he meant, but the man had disappeared. Then I typed "technical Christian" in different Internet search engines, but each time they were given only one reference to the same comment in my blog. Will have to fill this phrase meaning itself. Because it I was hooked. I have a suspicion that technical a Christian - it's me. And not just me.On my chest a cross, always carrying the gospel, but I am Liturgy 10 to 15 times a year. This happens impulsively: may half a year not to go, and then suddenly I go every week. As a rule, it becomes a consequence of an acute attack of insufficiency of the meaning of life. Never miss Easter and Christmas, the rest as necessary. Confess, receive Holy communion and pray in the mornings and the evenings, too, in waves.Do I think such a regime of normal Church life? I donГt think so. Do you want to lead a religious life more rich? Yes, I do. Moreover - I like it. When it fails, I feel the world turns a single logic and sense in my nervous system no bytes of despondency, Wake up in the morning so easily, as if not out of bed, and out of the hole. Why can't I live forever? Because I am human, that in translation from human language to the divine means "weak". And this human weakness - the obsessive desire to harm himself. Not explainable by anything but mystical categories.But back to the technical parameters of my faith. I read one time the old Testament as a whole (by force) and ten times - New (want to read more). I have two bookshelves that were occupied by the teachings of the Holy Fathers and just good books religious thinkers. Favorite: Nicholas Serbian, Theophan The Recluse, Clive Lewis. That is, I generally know the fundamentals of Christianity, understand his logic, I feel many aspects of the interaction between God and the human soul. Finally turning to scientific terminology, I have enough "legal" knowledge to not be able to lie to myself, though different from what I had done is not a sin or a sin, but not heavy.And yet I sin. And not in homeopathic doses, which cannot but sin's a good man. In a much larger.Every time after Easter Orthodox and anti-Orthodox researchers and publicists start counting: how many of us real Christians, how much lime and what is the difference. Seventy percent, ten and a half? I'm not ready to join this statistical gymnastics, because God knows who among us will behave in a Christian way at the critical moment - the one who regularly went to Church, or who, like the Holy Martyr Boniface, my whole life, drank, fornicated and toiled, and then just couldn't get past the arena where Christians were executed, and joined them.And yet, of course, in every society there are varieties of weaknesses that force others to put the word "Christians" with all sorts of adjectives: ethnic, Easter or here, for example, technical, which, I think, gradually replacing ethnic. The difference between them is that the second to the question: "What is Christianity?" - most often two words together can't. They baptized in infancy, were annually driven hallow eggs in my childhood, they were taught to put candles and properly baptized. They even read the gospel and remember the story. But in the essence of the gospel and the spirit of the gospel, they did not penetrate. Therefore, for ethnic Christian to get drunk in the Annunciation of vodka, and then dive in Jordan and thus "cleansed" it's okay."Technical Christian" is the other. They already understand that it's not the Easter cakes and eggs and not even in the veneration of icons. They know that daily prayer is not a panacea, because even "the monks, koi do not connect external prayer with the internal, not the monks, but black cinders" (St. Seraphim of Sarov). And not once, not twice read General Epistle of the Apostle James: "Thou believest that God is one; you do well the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, o vain man, that faith without works is dead?".